My three little girls have autism. Are vaccines responsible? Hell if I know. Does it really matter? All I care about is that they get appropriate treatment for their condition.
No Link Found Between Vaccine Mercury and Autism
by leavingwt 132 Replies latest social current
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bohm
no longer waiting: Welcome! "For any current JWs lurking on this site, let me just say: "If you want to keep your faith, don't check your references."" -- coolest advice ever :-).
I think conspiracies, medical quackery, etc. is quite scary. Why are we so geared towards believing these things so strongly? Why do we all have a mechanism such that once we begin to believe something, it become so difficult to escape the grip of confirmative bias and the "ooooh yah, but a scientist i know says something else!"? The organic food movement definately have a ring of quackery to it. I recently spoke with a girl at a party who lived at a "stone-age diet" (only live on plants and animals found in northern europe during the stone age, sounds like fun, huh?), and she went on and on how she could not live on potatoes because they was "breed to be unnatural".
Well, I asked her what she mainly lived of: "Banana milkshakes". "But is that really stone-age diet when you consider the modern banana was breed only about 100 years ago, and all bananas are infertile clones of that first mutated banana?"
She got a wold-class "thats not in the textbook" look on her face and ended up saying bananas was a special plant, so even though it was a mutation, it was okay. I ended up deciding that perhaps i was wrong and the banana was a known stable of the stone-age diet after all, so lets have a beer :-).
A YEC could not have done it better.
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cognizant dissident
Bohm: The human brain is a strange organism, that's for sure. I read an article, linked from a thread on this site about a psychology study that showed people always tend to believe the first thing they hear over additional conflicting information, even if the later conflicting information is from a much more credible source. Even if the first information is irrefutably proved wrong, and the additional information is repeated enough and becomes common knowledge, then people will still tend to attribute it incorrectly to the first source.
This is why early childhood conditioning is so strong and why most people do not detour much from their own cultural beliefs and attitudes. I guess there is truth in that old scripture, "train up a boy in the way he should walk when he is young and he when he is grown he will not turn aside from it" (paraphrasing somewhat)